It is perhaps the absolute definition of the here and now. The ultimate pleasure we chase and yearn for that we believed could be a lifelong promise passes in a matter of moments. But if that moment was meant for us we seek to recreate it again and again and again. It makes no difference who the person is. How wrong or how right for us they are. We don't know what that means and we truthfully do not much care in fact. We simply want the high to stay. We crave it. We depend upon it. And we need it. It is not sexual adventure so much as it is fantasy. And we have the power to create that fantasy with our loins. We stir these passions like a forbidden formula and life is what we make it while we give this person a portion of our being.
Who are you? A man once asked me. I didn't know any better at the time. I told him I was God's son, my parent's son, and some pseudo intellectual description about my past evolving my future. I see now how confused I must have sounded. The son of a conservative construct I once believed in but life constantly battered its foundations.
You see it doesn't matter what you are taught. What you are taught has to prove itself against the reality of life. Can you imagine learning that two plus two equals four, only to graduate from college, find employment and be thrown into a world where two plus two does not equal four. But actually two plus two equals a number of possibilities and the number four is just an abstract representation of an infinite number of possibilities.
I think that life is the quantum physics of morality and religion. After all, the only historical records of Jesus or Muhammad are only found in the bible and the Quran.
Jesus was born of a virgin you see. And yet Jesus wept.
How unfortunate it is that the rest of us were not born of a virgin and therefore do not posses the apparent god like qualities we are given of the god man. And therefore the standard of life we are given cannot be expressed in like manner. I realize the truth now; who we are is beyond our comprehension, everything and everyone we encounter in our lives have more to do with representations of things and qualities we know nothing about. So that who we are is not a conclusion we come to by assumption. I cannot assume to assimilate my faith into one great acronym that announces my identity to the world. Rather my identity is one of deduction. The more I realize what I am not, the more I become familiar with who I am.
I closed the book, capped my pen and placed it atop my television. That small 12" screen was the only representation of the life I remembered that I had. I watched shows like Maury, Jerry Springer and People's Court only to keep me sane. It may sound paradoxical but they were real people doing real things. And yes it may be somewhat scripted but what the hell? We all are characters in an ever evolving story not entirely our own. That screen and my journal had been the keys to my sanity.
It had been seven years, six months exactly. Today was the day I had prayed for so long. So afraid I was that it was a hoax of some sort, created to keep me from engineering some feat that would make the entire system look stupid and foolish yet again. But it wasn't a hoax I knew. I was to be released into the land of the living. Real people doing real things. An impressive arrangement of possibilities and choices no longer limited by forty feet concrete walls and iron bars.
I glanced at the clock on the screen. Four am. The guards would be making their rounds soon. One last time perhaps before they came and got me from this iron crypt.
And what was that look he gave me? What was he saying with the sagging face surrounding his bleary eyes, puffed up from lack of sleep and medication he felt confined to. Was he happy for me? Impressed maybe. That a man of my position and impossible predicament could actually be standing on the doorstep of something as improbable as freedom.
I leaned back and stared at the wall above the television.
How did it happen exactly? A man convicted of charged like assault, accused of things like narcotics trafficking, money laundering; having attempted an escape from prison once and actually succeeding the second attempt; how is that a man like this facing over one hundred years of hard prison time managed to find himself almost free?
I don't know the answer to that. I say it is God. God made it happen. I say it and believe it wholeheartedly but the fact is that I do not know what that means. The conundrum: I believe in God the idea; I do not believe in God the myth. Does that make me ungrateful? Does that make me thankless?
No. It makes me concerned. And try as I might the fact remains the same.
The sound echoed loudly down the length of the corridor. There it was. The gate to my tier; one more final round.
"There it is Big Dre! There you go baby!"
It was Gary in the cell next to me. He had been staying up with me for the last 24hrs making sure that I didn't fall asleep. As if that was even a possibility.
"It's bad luck to fall asleep Dre." He would tell me over and over. "You falling asleep when you are supposed to be getting out is like you fucking the pastor's wife when god comes back in the rapture."
Were he not so serious it would be blasphemy. But the man was serious.
"How's that?" I recalled asking him. "The two are not anywhere near the same thing."
"Hell yeah they are!" He insisted. "Shit yeah they are. If god can save you outta prison then he is coming back for sure. You fucking the pastor's wife is like telling god 'I don't believe your lying ass so I'm gonna do whatever the hell I wanna do. You think god ain't gonna get you for that?"
Kind of an extreme analogy...
"You sleep when it's time to walk out these bars you say to god the exact same thing. It says 'fuck you, I've been doing time for the last seven years and I ain't changing a damn thing'. Guarantee your ass will be right back in this mother fucker like damn holy father! What the fuck?"
I remember frowning and shaking my head. The profanity of this man...
"You think I'm fuckin' lying?" He had peered into my cell, receding hair line arching back even more as he arched his eyebrows towards me.
"I ain't lyin' Dre. "This is the third time I've been locked up in this motherfucker. I used to think it was this gaddamn racist state of Indiana. You know the Klu Klux Klan was founded in Indianapolis?"
"Yeah that's what they've been saying"...
"And then I realized it had nothing to do with those tractor trailer devils."
"No?"
"No." He stated flatly. "It's because I slept the night before my release." He slapped his leg in conjunction. "Jesus told his disciples to watch and pray. Watch and pray while he was in the garden talking to almighty god trying to figure out why he should die for the sins of man."
The doors rolled open and he took a step inside to make sure I could hear him.
"Do you know what happened Dre? After Jesus told them that do you know what those fools did?"
Before I could nod he continued his profanity laced lecture.
"Those motherfuckers fell asleep goddamnit! You have god in the flesh telling you to stay awake and all thirteen of those assholes fell asleep and the stinking Roman guards took god away and killed him."
“Twelve.”
He stepped into his own cell now just in time as it began to close. Lunch was over and all the inmates were coming back our tier was the last. Except I chose not to go to the chow hall this last week. I was determined to eat all my commissary before I left because according to Gary leaving with commissary not either consumed or thrown away was also bad news. Or more simply perhaps, I just didn't want to chance anything crazy happening to throw off my approaching freedom. Everything bad happened in the chow hall and absolutely nothing good.
"On three!" Came the cries. "Officer on three!"
We were the top range and therefore range number three. It was a concerted effort to shout the range walk. Just in case you had contraband or your dick in your hands relieving yourself of pressure, it gave you time to put it away.
"Dre!" Gary called over to my cell. “Jesus said watch and pray. You get out and don’t come back. If you come back you ain’t never getting out again. Stay the fuck away from here.”
Tap.
The metallic click of the Officer's flashlight against each cell.
"Don't go to sleep."
That was Tuesday. It was now Friday. THE day. I figured Gary may have a point. Even if he chose to deflect his criminal habits onto superstition it couldn't be a bad thing. As if I could sleep at a time like this anyway.
Tap.
The guard and his patheon of keys chimed like the foreboding bells of the prison yard. Top of the hour every hour. Count time.
There it was again that look he gave me. Like he was saying something to me. He stopped this time and peered into my cell breathing mightily. I feared his chest would explode from under his double chin. I wondered what his cholesterol levels were.
“Should be any moment Mr. Rosen.”
I nodded politely.
“You need anything?”
I shook my head no. “I think I’m good. If I don’t have it now I don’t need it.”
“He don’t need shit from you shit stick. Leave the man alone!”
Gary again. The entire tier erupted in laughter. And here I thought everyone was asleep. Truth was that the man’s name was not shit stick. It was Chitschtick. But of course, what would a name like that get you? Especially in a level three prison. There were simply too many levels of insults one could create.
But Gary simply ignored the guffaws. “I’ll come get you when it’s time.”
I nodded while he walked off. Gary started spouting off talking some type of nonsense about how he hated Correctional officers and police. I couldn’t quite hear him for suddenly I felt the urge to take up my journal again.
Quickly I thumbed the pages to the entry I sought.
December 12, 2008.
“All we know is what we know. Nothing more nothing less.” I’d read the familiar words over and over again much like I’d read most of my journal. Like a religious text of some sort, there was something peaceful about it. I felt as though I’d earned the right to a certain confidence that came from being able to make sense of my thoughts when the chaos and fears of live tempted me to give up entirely.
“Only a foolish man claims to have knowledge of that which he has not experienced. If he knew that what he has faith in is true, then there would be no need for his faith. For ‘faith is the substance of things hoped for. The evidence of things unseen.’
It is not faith that gives a man purpose. It is not belief in some unseen truth. It is neither knowledge of anything seen or unseen. What gives a man purpose is fear.
And what is fear? I believe that fear is defined by the unknown. The inconclusiveness of it all draws us to the ongoing struggle; the need for validation. And in this the bold find courage and the weak find refuge in failure.
God did not make you weak. God did not make you strong. God did not make you at all. For one cannot create what one does not posses. If weakness exists, and it does, it means god made it because there is nothing that exists that God did not make. Which also means that tragically, god is also weak. Therefore if god made you strong that would also mean that god made weakness. For there can be no strength if there is no weakness.
You are because you are. And whatever you are, you do not owe to God. You owe it to yourself and you owe it to others. God is an idea, nothing more. And ideas evolve and change with time.
One cannot know everything, be everything and include everything and have purpose. It is the unknown which gives us purpose. It is impossible to live without it. The omnipotent, all knowing, omnipresent God of our fathers is not a lie, but a misinformed version of their own imagination- an illusive idea. We all struggle towards this deification because only then will the struggle of humanity be over. And that is why me must learn.
In this life, our past life and the next, when you understand fear you understand life. Shape it. Mold it. Control it. Do this with fear and you do this with life.
It is possible to become the god you were taught to fear; only fear itself. The idea of god became the reality of god for our fathers. But the truth of god is simply an idea created by fearful men, afraid of what they did not know.
Become your own idea."
I allowed those words to resonate within me, etching themselves into my spirit one last time. Become your own idea. I believed I could do this. I believed I had the courage. I had come to the realization long ago that the whole of humanity is in the wretched state it is in because we have chosen to marginalize ourselves. Always looking for a master, always looking for a creator. Like a dog needs the love of his master for existence, somehow we deluded ourselves into believing that there is a deity out there somewhere who has chosen only a select few to carry out his will. The rest of us have to wander in the wilderness for forty years and if we are lucky god will chose to pull the spiritual blindness from our eyes and reveal to us his kingdom. And then it is up to us to respond to the call because we all have been given free will.
There were so many holes in this basic christian theological principal of religion I didn't know where to begin. But one thing I had understood during my plight behind walls was the complete illogical ideology of the idea humanity has accepted as god.
Believe me I searched, I prayed, I fasted I wept, I ran, I surrendered I rebelled. I did all the above. Yet the confusion within my soul only thickened. There is such a thing as prison religion I discovered. But even more illuminating was the knowledge that it was not regulated to prison. Most people run to god when they feel helpless. This is the understandable thing to do.
Yet curiously enough the most devout of the sect, the most polished of saints have learned to believe that true salvation from utter destruction and eternal damnation from the same god who created you in love can only be achieved not by running to god when you feel helpless. But learn to accept the portion of humility that asserts that we are always helpless. Every minute of our lives is a miserable one and the only way to save ourselves of this wretched state is to accept the perverseness of our existence and call to god for salvation.
People wanted to know why I ended up in prison. They ask me this all the time. Son of a man and woman of god, heir to spiritual benevolence and community stature; how is it that I ended up in prison?
Of course the answer is choices. And you must relay this to the judge and the attorneys. You must echo this to the counselor and prison guards who write your monthly and yearly reports as you are considered for parole.
"We want to let you out" they tell you. "But where is the contrition? We need to know that you are remorseful for what you've done and that you have the ability to accept authority."
And why the hell should I do that? Why do I need to bow down to institutions that were designed purely out of the founding effort to enforce the disproportionate distribution of wealth? Built top to bottom so that there can be those who have much, conceived off the misfortune of those forced to surrender what they own to these institutions of greed and destruction.
We accept these moral brothels for what? Because it is the way it is?
Fuck off.
Why did I end up in prison? I will tell you why. Because i said screw the damn system. And what is the system you may ask? I will tell you. The system is a conglomeration of institutions. There is the educational institution. We are taught a certain set of things a certain way for a reason. In history class, whatever they teach these children is not history. It is selective memory embellished in chronological summary.
There is the religious institution. Religion my friends is not about god. You do not know who god is. You do not know what god is. None of do. And that is the whole point. The late great Christopher Hutchins was very charismatic and he had some valid points that he nourished with courageous effort. But he was off base.
You see everything that exists in the world today was at one point nothing more than idea. Laptops, automobiles, financing.
What is money after all? We don't know the answer to that. We know what we use as money. Counterfeited pieces of paper with numbers denoting their value. But a one hundred dollar bill costs no more money to create than a one dollar bill. How much is that? 6.2 cents. And what is that? What is 6.2 cents? What is that number, where did it come from, how do things get their value? Exactly what is money in the first place? It costs 6.2 cents to mint a one hundred dollar Federal Reserve note that we call a one hundred dollar bill. And yet it costs $1.67 to mint a penny. Yet somehow the Benjamin Franklin counterfeited piece of paper has more value. Does this make sense to you? What type of system have we allowed ourselves to be slaves to?
I'll give you the short answer, it is an institution designed to be part of a system put in place to ensure that the engineers of modern society and their sponsors remain firmly in control of wealth so that the rest of us spend our entire lives making them wealthier as we clamor to survive.
The secret that is not a secret but is only a secret because we choose to ignore it is the ugly truth about society. The purpose of a society is not harmony. It is not community it is not collaboration. The purpose of society is to generate wealth for those who created the society from those who become part of it. That is all. Christopher Hutchins honestly believed that there was no and is no god. Christopher Hutchins was wrong; there is a god just like there is money. But god just like money is an idea that people then created companies to protect it: churches, temples, mosques, what have you. God is an idea that people appointed people to modernize. Who is more powerful? Ben Bernanke or the Pope? God is an idea which requires institutions to colonize Christianity, Islam, Judaism are constructed eerily similarly to the IMF, the World Bank and the Federal Reserve.
You see it is not that god is not real. The fact is that god is what the idea has become. And the institutions betray their relation by the statement of unification by the man they called god. Will you "render to Ceasar what is Ceasar's and render to god what is god's"?
Why did I end up in prison? I found myself incarcerated not because I rejected the system. I found myself here because I failed to understand that rejection is only the first step. But to make your path your own you must find a solution.
The problem with monarchy is that it was too volatile. One person wields the strength and wealth of the entire nation. He seduced the masses into giving him this power by convincing them, with the aid of the Pope, that god himself had appointed him to rule over them. And the stupid illiterate people of that time didn't know any better. They just as soon assumed that treason against the oppressive crown was an assault on god himself.
But there was no sustaining agenda to such a thing. As soon as the king was overthrown, the progress of that society was overthrown as well. Wealth could not be accumulated without being ultimately destroyed. The only true institution of the medieval period was the church. But as science evolved and people became aware, the church lost it's power. Institutions needed to be created and they needed to be created in such a way that created opportunity but restricted access.
America was founded not because of the sojourn of a handful of brave pilgrims. This story was brought to you by the chronological summary of selective memory from the nation's founders. We call it history. America was founded by brave men who understood that the future of society depended on authority independent of religion. Science made them lose faith in the absolution of god. We needed faith in something else. We needed faith for the weak. We needed faith for the docile. We needed faith in something greater for those amongst us without the intuition to look elsewhere; not to the stars, not to the gods but inward. God could not communicate without our help. That is why god never actually says anything in the holy scriptures. It is entirely a manuscript of human volition. If god needs us to communicate, that should alone suggest to you the true nature of things.
My greatest fear while being incarcerated was not that I would never get out of the crypt. My greatest fear was that I would become institutionalized. So heavily influenced by my surroundings that I would no longer see things independent of those surroundings- the real world- clearly. But my studies showed me I need not be afraid of such a thing. It was the real world that was institutionalized already.
Money is power. If everyone has money, everyone has power and there is no need for authority. Why? because authority is designed to aid the powerless. Which is why religion is about claiming to be powerless so that god will in turn give you his strength as propitiation for the good of your soul; much like dictators who have demonstrated that they are perfectly capable of governing must accept American democracy or risk being overthrown even assassination for the good of society.
I understood finally, after seven and one half years of hard time level three prison incarceration that I was incarcerated not because I had broken the law but because the fucking law could not break me. I would therefore remain incarcerated until I found a solution to the abomination I called The System. I believed this whole hardheartedly.
I was incarcerated in March 2004. It was now May 2011. And seven is the number of completion.
Beside me Gary was beating on the wall singing something about being free at last. I paused in my reading briefly to smile but lets be honest. In a matter of minutes this place will be nonexistent to me. Oh sure you tell some of your buddies that you will write and that you will come back to visit; things like that. But who in their right minds would do such a thing? The people of Israel did not go back to Egypt once they'd been delivered so goes the biblical tale. And neither would I.
There were one or two men whom I'd be forever grateful and if I ever could help them I would do so. But from a distance. I was free. I had to claim that and be that. If you are constantly trying to aid someone in a different situation and the help is given without protocol you will eventually become that situation because the help cannot be reciprocated. This is not being hostile or forgetting where I came from or who I am. It's called sophistication which evolves from the need for efforts to be reciprocated.
I had a reality to create. This reality could not resemble the iron bars of the last seven and a half years of my existence. This reality had to be something new entirely if I wanted to maintain it.
Become your own idea.
"I do not believe that god is an idea simply because I want to believe it. I believe it because of the deductive reasoning which can only come from living independently of doctrine of religion and the dogma that comes of it.
You see once god becomes anything more than an idea god becomes an identity with the particulars of human imagination which thereby limit the potential of said god to do and be so much more. For example you see that god is always referred to as a 'he'. But what is 'he' but a flawed human bound by the confines of this world? God cannot be a 'he' because 'he' becomes man. In which case we come to a point where we must then create a man and call him god for the religion to save face. A god man, as it were, and so we stumble across an historically inaccurate Jesus; the god man. This incredible tale of a man who was at the same time god who we are all to serve even though none of the story is committed to what we know to be true. The narrative of Jesus seeks to explain these untruths by attributing the nature of his god half deity which may actually save face were it not for the fact that almighty god himself is also a man: thus the pronoun 'he'.
In order to be real something must have a beginning and an end. Except the reverse is actually true. In order to be real there must be no beginning and there must be no end for this is the very definition upon which all existence is based on; matter. And we know that matter can neither be created or destroyed. Therefore, based on this truth, we understand that what we generally refer to as reality is actually an illusion. This life this world is as illusive as a reflection in the mirror you can never touch. Merely it is the reflection of light. Light has no beginning and light has no end.
And yet we are told that Jesus had a beginning, albeit from a virgin. That he ascended into the clouds. And that this same Jesus is coming back. To do what exactly? Establish another religion? In a word, yes. By taking all those home who believed in him and killing everyone who did not.
I digress for the story sounds insane. It is insane. And though I do not believe it to be entirely true in literal interpretation I do see the value in the story of Jesus. I see the value in the story of god. The idea behind god is to deceive humanity into forgetting our true origin. Who we are is not limited to human flesh.
The only way an artist can create is if he has lived what he is creating. The creation itself therefore cannot live apart from its creator and the creator is bound to his creation. Religion tries to convince us all that this is a spiritual truth. In fact this is partially true but the full truth is that this is both physically and metaphysically accurate.
The physical world we live in, our bodies, our globe, our continent our nation, our family...this is most clearly and accurately described as the reality we created. Me, myself, I am who I created myself to be.
When they said, in the biblical Genesis, in the beginning 'Let us make man in our own image' this was not the holy trinity. The trinity is never mentioned in any biblical text. Once more we find that it is a manifestation of human ingenuity to explain that which does not make sense yet can not be supported by that which is written. Rather the "we" spoken of in this biblical Genesis is humanity. Our spirits.
The spirits which inhabit our flesh are deities. We are not human. We are deities. Our flesh and bone avatars simply allow us to experience our creation. And life is the vehicle prescribed to find out how to make our creation better. In order to achieve this it must first be experienced by us; the creators.
The only god we answer to is the conglomerate of us all. Our metaphysical identity in unison is God. This is who and what we pray to and the only true religion is not worship, but the understanding that the good of all humanity can never be achieved so long as we do not understand this truth.
And this is love. Not that Jesus died for us but that we all died to become that which we created so that what was created might have life. The death of Jesus was tragic only because the truth of Jesus was obscured by those who sacrificed him for the religion they created in his wake.
Jesus tried to tell us what I have just told you. He said, and I quote: 'you are all gods'. John 10:34.
Why oh slave are you in chains? What cause have you to be bound? And what, save the words of mortal man, binds your soul to heaven or hell? You oh man are god. You oh woman are goddess. You answer to no one but yourself; the great body of us all that is your faction.
The Romans did not kill Jesus. The Jews did. This was his blasphemy. This was his passion and for this he was killed. I am you and you are me and I am we. And we are gods."
The entry ended and I closed the journal.
Five o'clock.
"On three!" Came the scattered cries.
"Andre!" It was Gary beating on my wall. "They are coming Dre! Your time baby, your time! You up? You awake over there? I told you don't go to sleep it's bad luck you know I thought I told you that you believe me right? Dre don't fuck with me I need this. I need to see you stay out it gives the rest of us hope goddamn it.."
Everything seemed to slow down and fade at the same time. The noise didn't fade it simply stopped mattering. I couldn't hear anything but my own breathing, my footsteps and my heart racing- reaching for freedom. Gary's voice, the hooting and hollering on the tier. Even Chitschtick as he opened my cell door and read my release papers simply did not matter. It was surreal. I came into the Department of Corrections at twenty years of age. I was leaving at twenty seven, almost twenty eight.
I heard everything, saw everything. And yet, at the same time, I did not.
I felt it. I felt the rush, the adrenaline the part of me that I'd held hostage for so long. The part of me that exists but so many of us do not allow to breath and that I had constrained in my stupidity. It was the part of me that was ready and willing to do anything and everything not just to survive. Such a subservient nature is survival; no, to live. It was my time to live- to be who I now knew that I was.
Do you know why so many people cannot answer that question:
Who am I?
It's because people are afraid. They are afraid not of what they do not know but of what they have forced themselves not to remember. The truth is that we do know. We know everything. We are not afraid of what we do not know we are afraid of what we forced ourselves to forget; those memories that we know the answer to but once refused to concentrate long enough to recognize.
A Christian is no more redeemed than a Muslim who is no more redeemed than a Jew who is no more redeemed than a Catholic.
The truth was that we are all in prison. We are in this prison because we refuse to accept the reality we have created and we choose to act as though someone else created it for us. This imposes some form of laughter because that is the same critique analysis used to assign prisoners. Refusing to accept responsibility is worse than denial it is criminal. This is the crime of humanity: the creation of a god that we have consigned to exist outside of ourselves so that we can hold him responsible even if it means living in servitude.
I found my way into this prison and I found my way out. The journey of discovery is unrelenting but it is the process of evolution. This world is not perfect and that is why we are living it. To experience our creation, all its hardships and its flaws. It's schemes, it's lies and corruption so that we can ascend through the death experience, go back to the artistic premise of a disembodied spirit where time does not constrain us and create something better.
A new heaven. A new earth.
This is why those obsessed with comfort on this earth will not inherit the new world. This is why Jesus said "the meek will inherit the earth." Matthew 5:5. It is impossible for those who've lived in the materialistic bubble that comfort creates to understand and truly appreciate the flaws of the world. This is the world that matters because this is the world that needs redemption.
I would redeem it. Or I would play my part to do so. This is why I'd been imprisoned and so to this is why I was now being released. To find this portion for all who would listen. This was the day: May 22, 2011. I had discovered my identity.
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